Entries Tagged 'life lessons' ↓

Hello world!

Did you forget the existence of this mediocre blog? The tagline is, after all, we update when we get around to it, so if you were expecting something a bit more regular, shame on you!

Actually, the reason for extended radio silence without the sporadic updates you know and love is that The Husband and I moved to a new residence! And, let me tell you, MOVING SUCKS. No matter how much money you save up, it’s never enough, and the experience leaves you broke, indebted to everyone you know and love, and on the verge of suicide.

Or at least, that’s always been my experience.

Good news, though! Apparently, through some miraculous turn of events, I’m going to get all my moving expenses back and then some, to the tune of 18 MILLION DOLLARS! How, you ask with the skepticism I expect to hear in your voice? Easy! Apparently, a Colonel Uday of Iraq was murdered and left all of his money in a Hong Kong bank with no next of kin to claim it! All I have to do is help a nice Asian business man retrieve the money, and he’ll cut me in for 70%.

At first, I thought it was one of those Nigerian scams, but it clearly can’t be, because it’s all involving ASIAN people!

MR. Song Li le
Hang Seng Bank Ltd.
Sai Wan Ho Branch,
83, Des Voeux Road,
Hong Kong.
(songlile64@gmail.com)

Good Day,

Let me start by introducing myself. I am Mr. SONG LILE, Director of
Operations of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd. I have an obscured business
suggestion for you. Before the U.S. and Iraqi war, our client Colonel
Sadiq Uday, who was with the Iraqi forces and also businessman, made a
numbered fixed deposit for 18 calendar months, with a value of Twenty Four
Millions Five Hundred Thousand United State Dollars($19,500,000.00usd)
only in my branch. Upon maturity several notices was sent to him, even
during the war which began in 2003. Again after the war another
notification was sent and still no response came from him. We later found
out that the Colonel along with his wife and only daughter had been killed
during the war in a bomb blast that hit their home.
You can read more about the bombings on visiting these sites below:

1.http://www.ccmep.org/usbombingwatch/2003.htm#3/19/03
2.http://civilians.info/iraq/deaths_data.php

After further investigation it was also discovered that Colonel Sadiq
Uday, did not declare any next of kin in his official papers including the
paper work of his bank deposit. And he also confided in me the last time
he was at my office that no one except me knew of his deposit in my bank.
So, Twenty Four Millions Five Hundred Thousand United State Dollars
is still lying in my bank and no one will ever come forward to claim it.

What bothers me most is that according to the laws of my country at the
expiration 5 years the funds will revert to the ownership of the Hong Kong
Government if nobody applies to claim the funds. Against this backdrop, my
suggestion to you is that I will like you as a foreigner to stand as the
next of kin to Colonel Sadiq Uday, so that you will be able to receive his
funds.

MODALITIES:

I want you to know that I have had everything planned out so that we shall
come out successful. I have an attorney that will prepare the necessary
document that will back you up as the next of kin to Colonel Sadiq Uday,
all that is required from you at this stage is for you to provide me with
your Full Names and Address so that the attorney can commence his job.
After you have been made the next of kin, the attorney will also fill in
for claims on your behalf and secure the necessary approval and of probate
in your favor for the move of the funds to an account that will be
provided by you. There is no risk involved at all in this matter, as we
are going to adopt a legalized method and the attorney will prepare all
the necessary documents. Please endeavor to observe utmost discretion in
all matters concerning this issue. Once the funds have been transferred to
your nominated bank
account we shall then share in the ratio of 70% for me, 30% for you.

Should you be interested please send me your,

1, Full names,
2, private phone number,
3, current residential address,

And I will prefer you reach me on my private email address below:
(songlile64@gmail.com) and finally after that I shall provide you with
more details of this operation.

Your earliest response to this letter will be appreciated.

Kind Regards,
Mr. Song Lile

My reply:

Please reply to my information below with all of the information regarding this transaction!

Weysan Dun*
11 Centre Place
Newark, New Jersey 07102
(973) 792-3000

* this would be the name, address, and phone number of the acting director of my local branch of the FBI, FWIW

So, if you’re a fan of Teh Intertubes, you know all about the non-smackdown that happened between Violet Blue and BoingBoing and just how boring and frustrating it’s been the past few days. When will someone at BoingBoing say something that doesn’t sound like Scott McClellan wrote it? When will the BB fan boys stop acting like Violet Blue is the devil? When will readers notice that BoingBoing and Big Brother share initials and memory hole policies?

For those of you who aren’t Intertubes fans or have been in a cave recently, the non-story of the year goes like this:

Violet Blue is a sex blogger and sometimes writer/radio show host who probably has more money than God that comes from simply talking about sex. Boing Boing is an anti-censorship, liberal vehicle for Cory Doctorow’s latest work copyleft/copyfight blog that pretty much makes money from talking about how much copyright, big government, and invasion of privacy suck. Sometimes, the libertarians on this blog are all over BoingBoing; sometimes, we’re just over it.

The connection between the two comes from the fact that Blue once wrote a few posts for BoingBoing, and used to be a favorite on BoingBoing insomuch as she was linked to with frequency. Over the course of a few years, Blue wrote for or was mentioned in BoingBoing somewhere on the order of 70 times, give or take a few, according to an LA Times blogger who bothered to go to the WayBack Machine and count.

Why the Wayback Machine? Well, that’s the rub. You see, according to BoingBoing, they “unpublished”, which is a NewSpeak way of saying “deleted”, not just articles by Ms. Blue, but every mention of her in existence on their site, effectively scrubbing her from their archives and sending her down the memory hole.

Trust us, Winston Smith was doubleplusbusy that day.

Naturally, for such an anti-censorship site as BoingBoing, this seems rather odd, especially since there was no transparency in the action to unpublish Ms. Blue: one day she existed in the BB universe, the next she did not. Even Ms. Blue was unaware of her deletion until this past week, when the news slowly began to trickle out that she was gone from BB. People began to ask questions, and alternatively flame the hell out of BoingBoing, and BB began a hard and fast policy of denial: any comment that mentioned Violet Blue was systematically deleted from their site. The InterTubes grew restless. Metafilter got involved, then ValleyWag picked up the story, which then hit its sibling site Gawker, and all hell broke loose.

Sometime yesterday, BoingBoing responded to the controversy with a non-post about the issue by Moderator-cum-Douchebag Teresa Nielson-Hayden, who did her best White House Press Secretary working interview and forced out the editors’ response to the controversy, which was pretty much “This is a personal blog, we’ll damn well do what we feel like and have no responsibility to tell the readers what happened or why. More over, this is personal, so leave us alone.”

Also, she cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.

Now, that by itself wouldn’t be so bad, if the comments that followed weren’t routinely attacked for asking questions that seemed pretty self-evident after reading the post, such as how can a blog about transparency and accountability be neither transparent nor account for its actions? How can they continue to post about Mr. Doctorow’s novel fighting Big Brother (entitled “Little Brother”) when they had gone totally BB themselves and unpublished a writer? Between Nielson-Hayden and the readers, things in the comments quickly spiraled out of hand and two camps formed: fan boys who believe BB can do nothing wrong, reading for two minutes of hate with Violet Blue as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the InterTubes, and conspiracy theorists and general uber-left communists who now want BB staff to post home addresses, SSNs, and all other personal data to be the most transparent InterTubes blog of all times or else fail miserably under the weight of evil corporate oppression.

After that there were only three or four new posts to BoingBoing’s site, ending around 3PM. Then, for six hours, BoingBoing was dark, save for the glowing light of the comments thread growing exponentially. Meanwhile, ever the willing victim in all of this, Ms. Blue was giving interviews to any blogger who would listen. She even created a spreadsheet detailing every post involving her that was deleted from BB. When it comes to being sympathetic, Ms. Blue seemed to be aiming for a new residency over at Fail Blog.

Lost somewhere in the maelstrom was the question that the first few hundred posts reasonably asked: what transgression did Violet Blue commit that was so horrible and unspeakable, she had to be erased from the annals of BoingBoing, at the expense of BoingBoing’s own integrity?

For anything even close to an answer, only the LA Times and SF Gate came close to getting answers, and theirs had the ring of X-Files paranoia to them.

1: Cory Doctorow is a big copyleft protector, fighter of the “evil” of copyright. Violet Blue legally changed her name two years ago to Violet Blue and soon after sued a porn star for using Violet Blue as a name. Said porn star is a single mom (Oh noes! Leftists always bleed extra hard for the single mommies!) quit the business to sell her own work herself (Leftists also get massive hard-ons for independent production and small business) and (here’s the actually important part) had been using the name since 1999, long before Ms. Blue was a sex blogger. Moreover, it is believed that Violet Blue knew of the porn star’s existence before legally changing her name, and allegedly, before even using the moniker at all. Blue (the sex blogger) even had Blue (the porn star mommy) on her radio show once. The fact that Blue (PSM) couldn’t afford a decent attorney and was trounced in court by Blue (SB) would have really pressed Doctorow’s buttons wrong and ended with Blue being throughly denounced on BoingBoing. However, Blue being a former contributor, it might have looked bad to other editors or the almighty sponsors if Blue was still on the site as a contributor and yet trashed later on, so it was best to delete her and go on their separate ways.

2. Federated Media supports BoingBoing through ad revenue almost exclusively. Like many other publications, BoingBoing could, theoretically, be held hostage to the demands of Federated Media, and if they decided association with Ms. Blue was becoming a liability, they could demand she be wiped from the site.

3. Blue was “riding the coattails” of her BoingBoing posts, according to some readers and bloggers familiar with the two. She allegedly referred to herself as the fifth BoingBoing editor, which may have bruised an ego or two, and eventually might have had a falling out over taking more credit than her due and trying to raise her importance level to back her new projects.

4. Editor Xeni Jardin and Ms. Blue were allegedly involved at some point, and the affair turned sour. A hurt Jardin may have then convinced the other three editors that deletion of Ms. Blue was the best way to go. This rumor is fueled by a LA Times blog post which suggests that after a conversation with both Jardin and Blue, the blogger was satisfied that it truly was a personal matter handled poorly and not worth the bru-ha-ha it generated. Of course, that blogger’s lips are sealed.

5. Combine theories three and four. Or, as ValleyWag puts it:

For Blue, we’ve come to believe, the friendship always had a mercenary angle — Jardin could get her linked as well as laid. The association with Boing Boing boosted Blue’s career. How painful it must have been for Jardin to realize she was being used by a groupie who wanted to join her band. And people in pain exercise supremely bad judgment, which is what Jardin did when she “unpublished” posts about Blue from Boing Boing.

None of the rumors implicate either Mark or David as the root of the problem, which makes sense, as Mark just seems like such a nice guy, you can’t imagine him getting into a fight with anyone (did you see him on the Colbert Report?) and David isn’t nearly as active as the other three. Mark and David are like the Ringo and George to Doctorow and Jardin’s Lennon and McCartney, respectively. While you can see the latter getting into public feuds with people, the former just are so freakin’ nice and quiet, you’d have to murder their ickle robot puppies for them to get upset with you, and even then you could probably settle the matter over a cup of tea or something.

So, no matter what theory you subscribe to, the one thing all the theories have in common is that BoingBoing has compromised their principles for some unnameable reason, which makes the compromising of said principles all the more suspect. For a group of editors who decry the Bush Administration (and who doesn’t anymore, really?) they sure have learned a few lessons from the last 8 years under Bush Jr’s reign, such as how to talk without actually saying anything.

War is Peace.
Secrecy is Transparency.
Long live BoingBoing.

From BBC News:

Apparently, a creative-minded car salesman in Missouri had an idea on how to stop flagging car sales due to increased gas prices: buy a car, get a gun for free!

Continue reading →

Confession time: I come from a family of cops. One time, when I was 18, I was making out with a boy in his car in the park when the police showed up. Immediately, he asked how old we were, then demanded ID from my boyfriend who looked older but was in fact several months younger than yours truly. When he saw my name, he looked up and said “Are you related to Officer [Name]“?

“Yes,” I shyly confessed. “He’s my mother’s cousin.”

“Well, I’m not going to escort you home, but if I catch you out here again, I know who your parents are.”

That wasn’t the end of that dating relationship, but it probably should have been.

I digress.

Point is, my whole life, I’ve known how to handle cops and handle myself around cops. I’ve never been scared of the police, I’ve always looked to them when I need help, and I still usually waive if I see one while I’m out and about. I never thought this came from being in a family of cops, just from having common sense. Then, there was Sara.

Sara was an employee of mine back when I was a retail manager. For a seventeen year old, she had a good head on her shoulders. She was polite, friendly, and worked hard to meet and exceed her sales goals, even if she did occasionally goof off. She was one of our best workers, and I tended to try and give her and one other person the bulk of the sales associate hours I had available to me.

Then, one morning, Sara called me in tears. She was meant to start her shift at 6PM, but she wouldn’t be in that night, or any night for a long time. Sara was grounded from all activities, including work, for at least two weeks following a DWI arrest with possession charges.

What?

Weeks later, when she arrived back at work (her parents took on the duty of driving her everywhere from then on out) she told me that she’d been going home from a party after a night of very light drinking, as she was the designated driver. She was following a friend to make sure they got home safely when she saw the flashing lights behind her. She pulled over, and the officer told her that she’d been following too closely. Smelling alcohol on her breath (allegedly), the officer asked her to step out of the car. Outside the car, the officer asked her if she’d been drinking. She told Sara that, if she complied and was honest, she would be lenient. Sara admitted to drinking. Bingo, this officer now had an underage drinker without a Breathalyzer!

Then, she asked Sara to submit to a Breathalyzer test, and she did. According to Sara, the officer tested her four times, until she registered a .08. At this point, the officer asked Sara if she could search the car, once again promising leniency. Sara agreed.

In the trunk was a bong with residue and a couple of joints.

Sara had called me from her house after being locked up overnight. When called, her furious parents refused to bail her out until the next morning (which, FYI, is what my parents would have done as well when I was that age.) The last I heard, Sara’s parents had hired a very good attorney and were fighting all the charges.

Unfortunately, it was an uphill battle.

Sara had done everything wrong. She stepped out of the car without asking if she was under arrest, she admitted to drinking, giving probable cause for the Breathalyzer. She allowed herself to be repeatedly tested. She allowed a search and even told them what they’d find.

However, you do not need to be another Sara. The ACLU has put together a handy-dandy little guide called What To Do If the Police Stop You and it is imperative that you read it! Do not give up your rights! However, I’d like to point out one thing about car stops:

You do not have to consent to a Breathalyzer in some states! In the state in which I live, you have the right to ask for a blood test, which is more accurate and must be administered at a hospital. Between dealing with the remainder of the stop and waiting in the hospital, you will stall for possibly hours, and every hour you’re not drinking is one less unit of alcohol floating around in your blood system. Do know, however, that if you’re completely tanked, a blood test is more accurate and less likely to be thrown out in court than a Breathalyzer, so exercise caution when demanding a blood test. But if you, like Sara, are right on the cusp of the limit, for god’s sake, know if your state allows it or not, and if so, demand a blood test!

According to an article by the BBC, certifiableed financial genius and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke has stated that he may cut interest rates *again*:

In his semi-annual report to the US Congress, Mr Bernanke said the Fed would continue to “act in a timely manner as needed to support growth”.

Analysts said his comments increased the likelihood of another rate cut at the Fed’s next meeting on 18 March.

Are you kidding me?

Okay, it seems counterintuitive for any rational American to be upset about interests rates being cut, I mean, it’s going to prevent a recession, right?

WRONG!

Here’s what happens when the fed cuts rates: mortgage, loan, and credit APRs decrease by fractions of a percent, which the Fed hopes will spur people taking out newer, bigger loans at the lower APR to pay off those old, high ones, also known as refinancing (re-fi). When people re-fi, banks can try and sell more money than they need to them, so that the borrowers can spend the extra cash while paying the same amount on their home or credit card (with credit cards, it’s called a balance transfer onto a newly opened account. Car loans are immune to this sort of re-fi). Even if you just take the exact amount to pay off the high interest balance and end up with lower monthly payments overall, this will free up your wallet for extra spending and spur the economy.

Now, here’s the problem: It Doesn’t Work Like That.

What will happen is that your credit card rate will decease by a fraction of a percent. If you are in such dire straights that you need to refi to free up cash to pay on that soon-to-be-repo’d house, sorry, but your credit probably sucks so much right now that no one’s going to lend to you anyway. So you fail, or more accurately, the Fed fails you.

And then there are those of us who have high-yield savings accounts and little to no debt. All this is doing is decreasing your savings because that tiny fraction of a percent you’re saving on my credit cards (assuming that you don’t pay your cards in full every month like I do) isn’t going to make up for the half a percent (or more) hit your bank account interest rate (you know, what they pay *you*) will take, so if you’re are responsible borrower, you lose too! The Fed fails again!

The only people who will benefit are those Middle Class Jerks who live beyond their means, who bounce from 0% card to 0% card with their massive balances from vacations to wherever the $160k-$80k/year people go, who’ll refi their homes to make repairs, who’ll buy repo’d homes and cars and flip them in a few years, who have no savings or retirement accounts because Social Security will take care of things, who vote Republicican….

…I’ve said too much, haven’t I?

In writing this article/entry, I wanted to find a photo of Elizabeth Wurtzel not already used by the NYTimes, which showed what I imagined to be a more dignified, grown up, partner-in-a-law-firm-ready Lizzy. This was the best I could find, but then again, it’s hard to have a non-coked-out photo when your life’s work has been built around the idea of being a coked out train wreck.

I forget where I heard it first, the news that Lizzy was going to Law School, that is. I believe it was sometime after More, Now, Again came out, sometime around the time that the atrocious film version of Prozac Nation was canned (almost forever) due to her comments about Buildings Fall Down Day, that she was numb to it, that it was an art project. I knew then when that interview, which painted her as difficult and as mentally ill as always, missing her interview appointment so that she ended up being interviewed in her hotel room in her pajamas, hit the papers, the girl would never write again…at least not a best seller.

So I was right, but not for a lack of trying. She then churned out More. Now. Again, which was critically panned, and The Bitch Rules, later renamed Radical Sanity, even later renamed The Secret of Life, which most reviewers didn’t even bother with, and the advice in which gave me some ideas which later turned out to be, at worst, seriously bad advice.

So, with an LSAT score no more than two points higher than mine, she went to Yale, the lucky bitch. She went, she took time off, she went again, she graduated. And now, according to the NYTimes, being a notorious drug addict with a mugshot that is quite easy to find if you know how to google, for a shoplifting incident she herself chronicled, with a FTW (Stands for “Fuck the World) tattoo visible in most unairbrushed, post-Prozac Nation photos, the girl who posed naked for the cover of one of her books is having difficulty finding a job in the uptight New England land once settled by Puritans who haven’t moved out since? I never would have guessed.

Looks like I will have to step in and fill the void. Quick, someone get me a drug dealer, a cigarette, and a cocktail, stat. And a typewriter or something. Yale Law School, here I come.

Tonight, we booked our tickets to go to England for the holidays. Of the $311 in taxes and charges added on to the super cheap $832 ($416/ea) ticket price, $202 of that was from the UK.

The Husband’s reaction was, “Damn you BROWN!”

Mine was, “And this is why socialism — even democratic socialism — sucks.”

So there we are, done in the ass by a country whose socialized medicine (which I’ve used while living there, mind you) and anti-gun laws should show the people of the US exactly why socialized medicine and anti-gun laws aren’t miracles and are Very Bad Things. And the next time you think “Yay, socialism!” remember the taxes, the sneaky, fuck-you-in-the-ass taxes you don’t even notice until you go “holy shit, that’s the manufacturer’s price?” such as UK airline passenger tax or VAT.

Some guy in Ohio was arrested a couple of days ago, largely because he was the kind of person who calls 911 when he doesn’t want to show his receipt and is then stupid enough to throw a hissy fit about showing ID. To a cop. That he called. Even though it wasn’t an emergency.

This is a great illustration of what happens when people try to be activists based on something they’ve read threads about on online discussion forums. Exhibit: after buying merchandise from Circuit City, customer refuses to show his receipt to the loss prevention guy posted on the door. Because he’s read leftist blogs about freedom, man, and he wants to show THE MAN that he can’t tell Joe Prole what to do. Ignoring the fact that he’s paid for the stuff, and it takes all of four seconds for someone to glance at a receipt and at said stuff in his bag. Ignoring the fact that, goddamnit, the loss prevention guy is hired specifically to CHECK RECEIPTS, and that if a bunch of shoplifters waltz out with stolen goods in store-branded bags, the loss prevention guy is the one who takes the hit for that. Namely by being fired.
Okay, yeah. I get it. You PAID for your goods, so why should you have to prove it? Well, because shoplifters also have the ability to say that they paid for their shit and walk out, with completely straight faces. This isn’t a case of OH MY GOD THE MAN WANTS TO SEE MY RECEIPT HOW DARE YOU ACCUSE ME OF BEING A SHOPLIFTER — it’s a case of, dude, seriously, you should just suck it up and show your receipt out of common courtesy of making it easier for a business to do business.

By the way, I claim utter bias in this: not just because I work for the company in question — I’d call this guy a fucktard if he pulled the same shit on Best Buy, CompUSA, the Apple Store, or Ann fucking Summers — but because twice a week I have to count different categories of items in-store to check if the number we have is the same as the system thinks we should have. And software – one of the things the fucktard in question bought – is a horrible category for this. People steal games all the goddamned time. The very least invasive thing a store can do is ask to see your receipt when you’re leaving. They’re not asking for ID. They’re not running a credit check. They’re not taking your picture for future reference, or your phone number, or any kind of personal details. If you put up a fight about it for no better reason than you don’t want to, that puts you on the same level as the people who bitch and moan about being forced to wear seatbelts by the government.
YOU GAIN NOTHING BY ARGUING THIS, SAVE INCONVENIENCING OTHERS. You’re the kind of jackass who edits random shit out of Wikipedia articles because you think it’s non-notable. You’re the kind of person who finds a loophole in a BB system’s rules to say inflammatory shit and then cries and moans about being thrown out.
You’re a real-life troll, making it difficult for other people just so you can feel smarter and more important.

Here’s a suggestion: if you’re all gung-ho about your rights, do something that MATTERS. Go to a rally. Form a lobbying group to effect change. Organise a letter-writing campaign to your local politician. Run for local office.
Or failing that, try refusing to show ID and strolling straight into a nightclub, past the SAS-looking motherfucker on the door.

So keep reading those online forums about how it’s your right to not leave a tip if you don’t like the way the waitress didn’t smile at you, Mr. Training Consultant Fucktard. And the next time a troll starts wrecking the discussion and then points out that he’s not technically breaking any rules, then remember how you behaved exactly the same way to some poor schmuck trying to do his job.